Look Out, NY1: Here Comes FiOS1

In the Big Apple, Verizon is bringing out another weapon to fight cable: weather updates every 5 minutes.

The telco this summer will launch FiOS1 in New York City, stepping up its hand-to-hand combat against Time Warner Cable’s NY1 and Cablevision’s News 12, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Verizon launched FiOS1 in Washington, D.C., two years ago, and has featured college basketball telecasts in Northern Virginia and parts of Maryland. Since then the local channel has ranked in the “top 20% by viewers of the 350 channels the company offers, despite Verizon’s ample menu of high-definition programming,” Verizon tells the WSJ.

In NYC, FiOS1 will feature traffic on the 1s and weather on the 5s, but Verizon “hasn’t produced a professional newscast or hired local reporters as Time Warner and Cablevision have,” according to the newspaper. One of the Verizon shows does feature “community news shot by so-called citizen journalists.”

Well, sure, that’s probably cheaper. But will Verizon’s me-too local cable news channel gain a real following with this approach?

Note that NY1 provides live breaking news coverage, such as when one of its reporters captured video of the US Airways jetliner before its crash-landed in the Hudson River in January.